How can this ever be sustainable without a huge monthly subscription?
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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They keep borrowing and giving out 'free' tokens until people are hooked.
Then gradually introduce different payment methods until they figure out what works best.
Then prices rise (I'm guessing, rather rapidly) to pay off all of the loans and to start making profits.
In the meantime, their machines are learning from the users, and learning which areas and how it can be most profitable.
Boom. They've created a profitable business that nobody wanted, nobody asked for and nobody needs. The interactors don't even realise that they're not even really using it, they're training it.
DON'T USE AI.
YOU'RE CREATING MORE PROBLEMS. MORE BEZOS' AND MORE MUSKS.
It can't. But somehow the dev hasn't noticed I guess?
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From their blog on Steam:
For the paid release, we plan to account for expected AI usage in the game’s price. Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game. This isn’t because each player is particularly expensive to support. The total cost has increased because so many people are playing, and we have taken out a bank loan to help keep the demo running.
I do not understand. They have to factor in token usage to the game price, but also the longer people play the more they will lose money over time? How is that even an operating model.
If they don't let players hook up their own API key, it's a guarantee they shut it down after a year.
More like a month.
My guess is that they are just morons. It is really easy to be confident in your projections if you are a stupid person.
It seems that it's one of those games with zero replayability
They probably bank on streamers make fun videos in 4-5 hours of gameplay total, then the people that buy the stuff and never play it
Btw it uses Gemini and gpt, it's expensive to run that.
What if someone pirates the game and starts wasting tokens?
zero replayability
Missing one of the only good reasons to include AI in your game...
And a 4chan troll army could bankrupt them for funsies.
Ai probably approved the idea and said it was great.
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You could literally spend $0 and an afternoon hooking up a 4gb model to the game and having it run locally instead. Or you could also spend $0 and code a decision tree that would be fun for players to experience. Or you could choose the dumbest possible option and bankrupt yourself for no reason
Number 3 please!
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Why can't they just fine tune a small locally hosted model? Are they dumb?
Most gamers have a GPU anyways
Exactly my thought. Surely you could and achieve at least a similar result.
I would say yes, yes they are dumb. Taking out a loan for a game that isn't even out yet according to the article to keep an ai going is pretty stupid. Even if the game does well, the overhead is massive for what could be done with a smaller specialized model. Hell, I bet payig someone to train an existing model would be significantly less than a $1000 a day when you aren't even making money yet.
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So they didn’t even do the math for a basic cost forecast before launching the demo. Also this shit makes them vulnerable for bad actors. Just put this game on several PCs and run it 24/7 to bankrupt them.
What makes you think that the demo just got massively more popular than expected? This is probably an occam's razor type of thing.
I'm more curious about how they were planning on structuring the full game to make a profit. Hopefully they're just planning on using a client side ai, but that would likely make the demo somewhat deceitful.
Another engineer I work with had a really well put description of proper AI implementation that really applies to this:
"AI should help you build the automation, AI should not be the automation."
AI should help, not do.
AI: only do, not help
AI running a video game, somehow still less power efficient than a playstation 1. Good job guys. Just make an actual video game.
AI powered games don’t work.
We did a super cool project for a game jam last year. Cost like 50c per game for us.
Cool for the 100 or so players who tried it, but there’s no way to make a profit from it.
Local models maybe.
For just simple and guided actions and dialogue, local would be fine for this. Or better, have AI design the large database of what to say or do when a player does things. No need to reinvent what players are going to duplicate. The token cost was worse when you consider all the same stuff being prompted over and over.
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How long before the internet is flooded with clips of the little sister saying all kinds of nasty stuff after people prompt inject the AI?
Given that people playing this have GPUs, why not run the AI model locally? I can't imagine it needs to be a very large model.
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The AI disclosure on Steam claims the sister's voice is generated by a local model. If they're being charged for tokens I somehow doubt that.
Probably only the voice is local. Natural voice requires a voice synthesis model. The “reasoning” is probably offloaded to a cloud service.
It's every bit as horrible as you're probably imagining. She has one of those talks-too-fast fake slop voices like on the YouTube spam shorts.
Hilarious article to put out tbh. If the game wasn't broken before, it's gonna be now.
That sounds like the most boring game imaginable and I hope they go bankrupt from it
Guess you've never heard of Desert Bus.
Does Desert Bus require tokens? If not, carry on.
Desert Bus was part of a compilation of six games and if you played it today it would still work.
And they say there’s a bubble, pffffffffffffffffft
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